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November 16, 2013

Research in recent years has suggested that young Americans might be less creative now than in decades past, even while their intelligence — as measured by IQ tests — continues to rise.

But new research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, closely studying 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks, hints that the dynamics of creativity may not break down as simply as that.

Instead, it may be that some aspects of creativity — such as those employed in visual arts — are gently rising over the years, while other aspects, such as the nuances of creative writing, could be declining.

The paper will be published in Creativity Research Journal in January 2014. The lead author is Emily Weinstein, a doctoral student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Katie Davis, UW assistant professor, and fellow researchers studied 354 examples of visual art and 50 examples of creative writing by teenagers published between 1990 and 2011. The question they pursued, Davis said, was “How have the style, content and form of adolescents’ art-making and creative writing changed over the last 20 years?”

The artwork came from a monthly magazine for teens, the writing from a similar annual publication featuring student fiction. The researchers analyzed and coded the works, blind as to year, looking for trends over that time.

The review of student visual art showed an increase in the sophistication and complexity both in the designs and the subject matter over the years. The pieces, Davis said, seemed “more finished, and fuller, with backgrounds more fully rendered, suggesting greater complexity.” Standard pen-and-ink illustrations grew less common over the period studied, while a broader range of mixed media work was represented.

Conversely, the review of student writing showed the young authors adhering more to “conventional writing practices” and a trend toward less play with genre, more mundane narratives and simpler language over the two decades studied.

Still, Davis said, it’s too simple to just say creativity increased in one area and decreased in another over the years.

“There really isn’t a standard set of agreed-upon criteria to measure something as complex and subjective as creativity,” she said. “But there are markers of creativity — like complexity and risk-taking and breaking away from the standard mold — that appear to have changed.”

The researchers also note that the period of study was a time of great innovation in digital art, with new tools for creative production and boundless examples of fine art a mere click or two away, serving to inform and inspire the students in their own work.

Davis said that while previous research has typically studied creativity in a lab setting, this work examined student creative work in a more “naturalistic” setting, where it is found in everyday life.

She added that with data from such a naturalistic setting, researchers cede a degree of control over the characteristics of the sample being studied, and the findings cannot safely be generalized to all American youth.

“It remains an open question as to whether the entire U.S. has seen a decline in literary creativity and a parallel increase in visual creativity among its youth over the last 20 years,” Davis said. “Because society — indeed any society — depends on the creativity of its citizens to flourish, this is a question that warrants serious attention in future creativity research.”

The paper’s other co-authors are Zachary Clark and Donna DiBartolomeo, former graduate students at Harvard.

The findings are also discussed in Davis’ recent book with Howard Gardner, “The App Generation.” The research was funded by the James and Judith K. Dimon Foundation.

October 23, 2013

Good news for parents: Those pricey piano lessons or random toy parts littering your floors may one day lead to the next scientific breakthrough.

That’s according to new Michigan State University research linking childhood participation in arts and crafts activities to patents generated and businesses launched as adults.

In the study, which is published in the most recent edition of the journal Economic Development Quarterly, the researchers defined “childhood” as up to 14 years old.

The team of multidisciplinary researchers studied a group of MSU Honors College graduates from 1990 to 1995 who majored in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or STEM. They found of that group, those who own businesses or patents received up to eight times more exposure to the arts as children than the general public.

“The most interesting finding was the importance of sustained participation in those activities,” said Rex LaMore, director of MSU’s Center for Community and Economic Development. “If you started as a young child and continued in your adult years, you’re more likely to be an inventor as measured by the number of patents generated, businesses formed or articles published. And that was something we were surprised to discover.”

Musical training seems to be important. The researchers found 93 percent of the STEM graduates reported musical training at some point in their lives, as compared to only 34 percent of average adults, as reported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The STEM graduates also reported higher-than-average involvement in the visual arts, acting, dance and creative writing.

In addition, those who had been exposed to metal work and electronics during childhood were 42 percent more likely to own a patent than those without exposure, while those involved in architecture were 87.5 percent more likely to form a company. And children with a photography background were 30 percent more likely to have a patent.

Why?

Such activity fosters out-of-the-box thinking, the researchers said. In fact, the group reported using artistic skills – such as analogies, playing, intuition and imagination – to solve complex problems.

“The skills you learn from taking things apart and putting them back together translate into how you look at a product and how it can be improved,” said Eileen Roraback, of MSU’s Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities. “And there’s creative writing. In our study, a biologist working in the cancer field, who created a business, said her writing skills helped her to write business plans and win competitions.”

The results of the study could be crucial to rebuilding the U.S. economy, the researchers said.

“Inventors are more likely to create high-growth, high-paying jobs in our state, and that’s the kind of target we think we should be looking for,” LaMore said. “So we better think about how we support artistic capacity, as well as science and math activity, so that we have these outcomes.”

In addition to LaMore and Roraback, the research team included Robert Root-Bernstein, professor of physiology; John Schweitzer, professor in the Center for Community and Economic Development; James Lawton, professor of sculpture; two undergraduate students and one graduate student.

- See more at: http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/a-young-picasso-or-beethoven-could-be-the-next-edison/#sthash.3ghvsyvH.dpuf

October 04, 2013

Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In 2011, when an MIT senior named John Romanishin proposed a new design for modular robots to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said, “That can’t be done.”

Two years later, Rus showed her colleague Hod Lipson, a robotics researcher at Cornell University, a video of prototype robots, based on Romanishin’s design, in action. “That can’t be done,” Lipson said.

In November, Romanishin — now a research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — Rus, and postdoc Kyle Gilpin will establish once and for all that it can be done, when they present a paper describing their new robots at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces.

Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other.

“It’s one of these things that the [modular-robotics] community has been trying to do for a long time,” says Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.”

Embodied abstraction

As Rus explains, researchers studying reconfigurable robots have long used an abstraction called the sliding-cube model. In this model, if two cubes are face to face, one of them can slide up the side of the other and, without changing orientation, slide across its top.

The sliding-cube model simplifies the development of self-assembly algorithms, but the robots that implement them tend to be much more complex devices. Rus’ group, for instance, previously developed a modular robot called the Molecule, which consisted of two cubes connected by an angled bar and had 18 separate motors. “We were quite proud of it at the time,” Rus says.

According to Gilpin, existing modular-robot systems are also “statically stable,” meaning that “you can pause the motion at any point, and they’ll stay where they are.” What enabled the MIT researchers to drastically simplify their robots’ design was giving up on the principle of static stability.

“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” Gilpin says. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”

That’s also what made Rus skeptical about Romanishin’s initial proposal. “I asked him build a prototype,” Rus says. “Then I said, ‘OK, maybe I was wrong.’”

Sticking the landing

To compensate for its static instability, the researchers’ robot relies on some ingenious engineering. On each edge of a cube are two cylindrical magnets, mounted like rolling pins. When two cubes approach each other, the magnets naturally rotate, so that north poles align with south, and vice versa. Any face of any cube can thus attach to any face of any other.

The cubes’ edges are also beveled, so when two cubes are face to face, there’s a slight gap between their magnets. When one cube begins to flip on top of another, the bevels, and thus the magnets, touch. The connection between the cubes becomes much stronger, anchoring the pivot. On each face of a cube are four more pairs of smaller magnets, arranged symmetrically, which help snap a moving cube into place when it lands on top of another.

As with any modular-robot system, the hope is that the modules can be miniaturized: the ultimate aim of most such research is hordes of swarming microbots that can self-assemble, like the “liquid steel” androids in the movie “Terminator II.” And the simplicity of the cubes’ design makes miniaturization promising.

But the researchers believe that a more refined version of their system could prove useful even at something like its current scale. Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects. They could assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed. And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions.

Strength in diversity

The researchers also imagine that among the mobile cubes could be special-purpose cubes, containing cameras, or lights, or battery packs, or other equipment, which the mobile cubes could transport. “In the vast majority of other modular systems, an individual module cannot move on its own,” Gilpin says. “If you drop one of these along the way, or something goes wrong, it can rejoin the group, no problem.”

“It’s one of those things that you kick yourself for not thinking of,” Cornell’s Lipson says. “It’s a low-tech solution to a problem that people have been trying to solve with extraordinarily high-tech approaches.”

“What they did that was very interesting is they showed several modes of locomotion,” Lipson adds. “Not just one cube flipping around, but multiple cubes working together, multiple cubes moving other cubes — a lot of other modes of motion that really open the door to many, many applications, much beyond what people usually consider when they talk about self-assembly. They rarely think about parts dragging other parts — this kind of cooperative group behavior.”

In ongoing work, the MIT researchers are building an army of 100 cubes, each of which can move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them. “We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand,” Romanishin says. Written by: Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

September 24, 2013

Brain may rely on computer-like mechanism to make sense of novel situations, says CU-Boulder study

Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of situations we've never encountered before—a familiar person in an unfamiliar place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role—but the mechanism our brains use to accomplish this has been a longstanding mystery of neuroscience.

Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a method similar to the "pointer" system used by computers. "Pointers" are used to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system to replace a variable.

For the study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team relied on sentences with words used in unique ways to test the brain's ability to understand the role familiar words play in a sentence even when those words are used in unfamiliar, and even nonsensical, ways.

For example, in the sentence, "I want to desk you," we understand theword "desk" is being used as a verb even though our past experience with the word "desk" is as a noun.

"The fact that you understand that the sentence is grammatically well formed means you can process these completely novel inputs," said Randall O'Reilly, a professor in CU-Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and co-author of the study. "But in the past when we've tried to get computer models of a brain to do that, we haven't been successful."

This shows that human brains are able to understand the sentence as a structure with variables—a subject, a verb and often, an object—and that the brain can assign a wide variety of words to those variables and still understand the sentence structure. But the way the brain does this has not been understood.

Computers routinely complete similar tasks. In computer science, for example, a computer program could create an email form letter that has a pointer in the greeting line. The pointer would then draw the name information for each individual recipient into the greeting being sent to that person.

In the new study, led by Trenton Kriete, a postdoctoral researcher in O'Reilly's lab, the scientists show that the connections in the brain between the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia could play a similar role to the pointers used in computer science. The researchers added new information about how the connections between those two regions of the brain could work into their model.

The result was that the model could be trained to understand simple sentences using a select group of words. After the training period, the researchers fed the model new sentences using familiar words in novel ways and found that the model could still comprehend the sentence structure.

While the results show that a pointer-like system could be at play in the brain, the function is not identical to the system used in computer science, the scientists said. It's similar to comparing an airplane's wing and a bird's wing, O'Reilly said. They're both used for flying but they work differently.

In the brain, for example, the pointer-like system must still be learned. The brain has to be trained, in this case, to understand sentences while a computer can be programmed to understand sentences immediately.

Other study co-authors include David Noelle of the University of California, Merced, and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University. The research was supported by an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity grant through the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Last year's US visit by Dmitriy Medvedev for modernization and innovation experience could not help but evoke an association with the unforgettable visit by Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev to the prominent American corn grower. And the attempts to forcefully compel the captains of Russian industry to engage in innovations are becoming ever more reminiscent of the party's economic decrees on introducing the "queen of the fields" on the vast Russian expanses.

Something similar took place in recent days in Arzamas. The acting president rattled his sabers and demonstrated his managerial anger. It turns out that -oh, horrors! - the heads of the state corporations had assumed a casual attitude towards the instruction of the nominal head of state, issued as long as a year ago. Instead of programmes for development and introduction of innovations, some presented formal excuses, while most of the state corporations ignored Medvedev's demands altogether. "The main problem consists of the fact that the corporation management - and also the profile-related ministries in Government - still do not view this task as being the top priority," Medvedev concluded. And he sternly demanded that they prepare proposals on disciplinary responsibility of specific managers within two week's time.

And so that everyone understands that the place-holder is seriously inclined, the head of the United Aviation Construction Corporation (OAK), Aleksey Fedorov, was dismissed for having a careless attitude towards innovation. The decision is a suspicious one. We may recall that one of the main projects of the OAK is the development of a fifth generation fighter jet. That is, a plane which in principle must represent the combination of tens, if not hundreds, of the most varied innovations. It would seem, this is an either-or situation. Either the fighter jet does not contain any breakthrough technologies, or the manager was fired for something else entirely (disruption of deliveries of planes to Jordan and problems with the recently submitted presidential airliner are cited as possible versions), and the innovations were just an excuse.

A stenogram of the meeting leads us to believe that, most likely, it was the latter. Heads of state corporations were being panned not for the lack of some specific work in the field of high technologies. The president gave them the dressing down because they did not meet up to certain purely formal indicators. For example, by volumes of financing R&D (despite the fact that most of the money comes from the state budget), or by number of patents. Or perhaps the reason for the dissatisfaction was the lack of "innovation commissioners" -special supervisors, who answer for seeking out and introducing high technologies.

There is no doubt that, by the next meeting, the chastised directors will qualitatively improve their indicators. There will be mass financing of R&D, which will not bring any results. Ultimately, is it not all the same by what article you cut up the budget, if the system is arranged in such a way that the expenditures are borne by the state, while the income is privatized? New high-paid positions will appear. Even the number of patents will increase. After all, if we wanted to, we could patent even an innovative shape of a donut hole. And the fact that there will be no technological breakthroughs -that we will learn a bit later. Under a different leader, who, I suspect, will not be so devoted to the idea of modernization.

The meeting participants were stubbornly quiet about the main reason for the anti-innovative mindset of the leaders of industry. Medvedev's predecessor had selected such a model of organization of industry, which in principle contradicts any development. In essence, all of these vertically constructed state corporations are monopolies. They have no competitors. They have in fact handed over production of consumer goods to foreign producers (meanwhile, today it is specifically civilian commodity production that is the main source of high technologies). The heads of the Russian state corporations are convinced that state consumers will take whatever they produce, without any innovations. Modernization, as the classic taught us, inevitably leads to decay. The exceptions - such as Rosatom (which has a colossal Soviet stockpile and at the expense of which it can compete on the foreign market) -are merely a confirmation of this rule.

Nikita Sergeyevich has gone down in Russian folklore as the "corn grower." Dmitriy Anatolyevich has every chance of being remembered as the "innovator."

December 28, 2010

ARMONK, NY - 27 Dec 2010: Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) formally unveiled the fifth annual "Next Five in Five" – a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

In the next five years, technology innovations will change people’s lives in the following ways:

You'll beam up your friends in 3-D with holography chat

In the next five years, 3-D interfaces – like those in the movies – will let you interact with 3-D holograms of your friends in real time. Movies and TVs are already moving to 3-D, and as 3-D and holographic cameras get more sophisticated and miniaturized to fit into cell phones, you will be able to interact with photos, browse the Web and chat with your friends in entirely new ways.

Scientists are working to improve video chat to become holography chat - or "3-D telepresence." The technique uses light beams scattered from objects and reconstructs them a picture of that object, a similar technique to the one human eyes use to visualize our surroundings.

You'll be able to see more than your friends in 3-D too. Just as a flat map of the earth has distortion at the poles that makes flight patterns look indirect, there is also distortion of data – which is becoming greater as digital information becomes “smarter” – like your digital photo album. Photos are now geo-tagged, the Web is capable of synching information across devices and computer interfaces are becoming more natural.

Scientists at IBM Research are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data, working on technology that would allow engineers to step inside of a designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across an interactive 3-D globes, and visualizing trends happening around the world on Twitter – all in real time and with little to no distortion.

Batteries will breathe air to power our devices

Ever wish you could make your lap top battery last all day without needing a charge? Or what about a cell phone that powers up by being carried in your pocket?

In the next five years, scientific advances in transistors and battery technology will allow your devices last about 10 times longer than they do today. And better yet, in some cases, batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices.

Instead of the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful, the result will be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery capable of powering for everything from electric cars to consumer devices.

But what if we could eliminate batteries all together?

By rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the transistor, IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor to less than 0.5 volts. With energy demands this low, we might be able to lose the battery altogether in some devices like mobile phones or e-readers.

The result would be battery-free electronic devices that can be charged using a technique called energy scavenging. Some wrist watches use this today – they require no winding and charge based on the movement of your arm. The same concept could be used to charge mobile phones for example – just shake and dial.

You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet

While you may not be a physicist, you are a walking sensor. In five years, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet and even your tweets will collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of your environment. You'll be able to contribute this data to fight global warming, save endangered species or track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world. In the next five years, a whole class of "citizen scientists" will emerge, using simple sensors that already exist to create massive data sets for research.

Simple observations such as when the first thaw occurs in your town, when the mosquitoes first appear, if there’s no water running where a stream should be - all this is valuable data that scientists don’t have in large sets today. Even your laptop can be used as a sensor to detect seismic activity. If properly employed and connected to a network of other computers, your laptop can help map out the aftermath of earthquake quickly, speeding up the work of emergency responders and potentially saving lives.

IBM recently patented a technique that enables a system to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis of seismic events, such as earthquakes, as well as provide early warnings for tsunamis, which can follow earthquakes. The invention also provides the ability to rapidly measure and analyze the damage zone of an earthquake to help prioritize emergency response needed following an earthquake.

The company is also contributing mobile phone "apps" that allow typical citizens to contribute invaluable data to causes, like improving the quality of drinking water or reporting noise pollution. Already, an app called Creek Watch allows citizens to take a snapshot of a creek or stream, answer three simple questions about it and the data is automatically accessible by the local water authority.

Your commute will be personalized

Imagine your commute with no jam-packed highways, no crowded subways, no construction delays and not having to worry about late for work. In the next five years, advanced analytics technologies will provide personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and route information to travelers than is available today.

IBM researchers are developing new models that will predict the outcomes of varying transportation routes to provide information that goes well beyond traditional traffic reports, after-the fact devices that only indicate where you are already located in a traffic jam, and web-based applications that give estimated travel time in traffic.

Using new mathematical models and IBM’s predictive analytics technologies, the researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that can affect commuters to deliver the best routes for daily travel, including many factors, such as traffic accidents, commuter's location, current and planned road construction, most traveled days of the week, expected work start times, local events that may impact traffic, alternate options of transportation such as rail or ferries, parking availability and weather.

For example, combining predictive analytics with real-time information about current travel congestion from sensors and other data, the system could recommend better ways to get to a destination, such as how to get to a nearby mass transit hub, whether the train is predicted to be on time, and whether parking is predicted to be available at the train station. New systems can learn from regular travel patterns where you are likely to go and then integrate all available data and prediction models to pinpoint the best route.

Computers will help energize your city

Innovations in computers and data centers are enabling the excessive heat and energy that they give off to do things like heat buildings in the winter and power air conditioning in the summer. Can you imagine if the energy poured into the world's data centers could in turn be recycled for a city's use.

Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. New technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office or houses.

A pilot project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.

October 21, 2010

October 21, 2010

Princeton computer scientists have developed a new way of tracing the origins and spread of ideas, a technique that could make it easier to gauge the influence of notable scholarly papers, buzz-generating news stories and other information sources.

The method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents — whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics — and to determine which documents were the most influential.

“The point is being able to manage the explosion of information made possible by computers and the Internet,” said David Blei, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton and the lead researcher on the project. “We’re trying to make sense of how concepts move around. Maybe you want to know who coined a certain term like ‘quark,’ or search old news stories to find out where the first 1960s antiwar protest took place.”

Blei said the new search technique might one day be used by historians, political scientists and other scholars to study how ideas arise and spread.

While search engines such as Google and Bing help people sort through the haystack of information on the Web, their results are based on a complex mix of criteria, some of which — such as number of links and visitor traffic — may not fully reflect the influence of a document.

Scholarly journals traditionally quantify the impact of a paper by measuring how often it is cited by other papers, but other collections of documents, such as newspapers, patent claims and blog posts, provide no such means of measuring their influence.

Instead of focusing on citations, Blei and Sean Gerrish, a Princeton doctoral student in computer science, developed a statistical model that allows computers to analyze the actual text of documents to see how the language changes over time. Influential documents in a field will establish new concepts and terms that change the patterns of words and phrases used in later works.

“There might be a paper that introduces the laser, for instance, which is then mentioned in subsequent articles,” Gerrish said. “The premise is that one article introduces the language that will be adopted and used in the future.”

Previous methods developed by the researchers for tracking how language changes accounted for how a group of documents influenced a subsequent group of documents, but were unable to isolate the influence of individual documents. For instance, those models can analyze all the papers in a certain science journal one year and follow the influence they had on the papers in the journal the following year, but they could not say if a certain paper introduced groundbreaking ideas.

To address this, Blei and Garrish developed their algorithm to recognize the contribution of individual papers and used it to analyze several decades of reports published in three science journals: Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology. Because they were working with scientific journals, they could compare their results with the citation counts of the papers, the traditional method of measuring scholarly impact.

They found that their results agreed with citation-based impact about 40 percent of the time. In some cases, they discovered papers that had a strong influence on the language of science, but were not often cited. In other cases, they found that papers that were cited frequently did not have much impact on the language used in a field.

They found no citations, for instance, for an influential column published in Nature in 1972 that correctly predicted an expanded role of the National Science Foundation in funding graduate science education.

On the other hand, their model gave a low influence score to a highly cited article on a new linguistics research database that was published in 1993 in the Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology. “That paper introduced a very important resource, but did not present paradigm-changing ideas,” Blei said. “Consequently, our language-based approach could not correctly identify its impact.”

Blei said their model was not meant as a replacement for citation counts but as an alternative method for measuring influence that might be extended to finding influential news stories, websites, and legal and historical documents.

“We are also exploring the idea that you can find patterns in how language changes over time,” he said. “Once you’ve identified the shapes of those patterns, you might be able to recognize something important as it develops, to predict the next big idea before it’s gotten big.”

September 22, 2010

When asked, every school child in the west will undoubtedly tell you that the Wright Brothers were the first to fly. Well, they would be half right. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly in the western world but few Ukrainians and even fewer westerns know that they were not the very first in the world to perfect man-made flight. That aeronautic breakthrough and honor goes to a Ukrainian inventor Alexander Mozhayskyi, and predates the Dec 17, 1903 Wright Brother’s attempt by a full two decades.

This was one of the historical curiosities that was highlighted at the 2010 Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival in Toronto this past weekend. One of the most popular displays that garnished the most visitor attention was the collection from the national historical museum in Kyiv, the world heritage site of Kyiv’s St. Sofiya cathedral and others, that featured vignettes of Ukrainian history. Produced by Taras Hukalo, assisted by Victor Glasko -this quote caught most people’s attention:

“In 1876 ALEXANDER MOZHAYSKYI flew 20 meters in steam-powered heavier than air aircraft of his own design in Voronovytsia, Vinnytsia region, Ukraine. He flew again twice in 1886. That is why Ukrainians call Voronovytsia the cradle of aviation.”

One article written in Ukraine’s Castles called “Voronovystia’s Wings opines: “Disputes about the question of who invented the first aircraft, Alexander Mozhayskyi or the Wright Brothers, can make for fascinating fireside chats and will never be settled. However, Ukrainians keep calling the Voronovysia village in Vinnytsia the cradle of aviation. The fact remains that in 1876, a strange machine built by Mozhayskyi , took off and flew in the Ukrainian skies.”

So Ukraine has a century old tradition of avionics.

Ukrainians and westerners are likely more familiar with Ihor Sikorsky. Hukalo’s display offers the following about Sikorsky: “Loosing friends in the midst of rising communist terror and mounting oppression, in 1919, after building the world’s first four engine bomber and other aircraft for the Tsar, Ihor Sikorsky , immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine to USA. In 1923 he established the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world and created the world’s first commercially produced helicopters, taking the lead in the world of design and manufacture of military, civil, commercial helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. Sikorsky’s helicopters are reputed to be the best in the world. “ Torontonians will remember Sikorsky helicopters, that were used to finish off the top sections of the CN Tower.

The other jewel in Ukrainian industrial aviation crown are Antonov and Motor Sich.

Hukalo & Glasko add: “Ukraine is one of just nine countries worldwide currently designing and building transport and top class civil aircraft. One plane, the Ukrainian AN-225 “Mriya”, NATO designation “Cossack”, is the largest aircraft in the world. General designer Petro Balabuyev said the Mriya can lift a payload of 250 metric tons in its huge belly or outside firmly secured to the top of its fuselage. Further more, despite its heavy weight (628,315 lbs. empty), with its 32 wheels it is capable of landing and taking off from sodden grass and /or ice covered fields.”

“The Antonov Design Center built the AN-225 in Kyiv, Ukraine where it also produces the second largest plane in the world, the AN-124 “Ruslan”. Involved in producing the Antonov Mriya and Ruslan’s engines model D-18T, in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, is Sich Motors. Founded in 1907, it is one of the largest enterprises in the world, the only one in Ukraine, manufacturing airplane and helicopter engines as well as industrial gas turbines.”

But Ukraine’s pre-eminence in aviation may be at risk from Russia.

On Sept 18, 2010 Interfax reported that “Ukraine is ready to offer Russia a number of joint ventures in various fields.”, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said during a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev last week, the eight since Yanukowych came to power.

One such proposal is Zaporizhia-based OJSC Motor Sich, who plans to set up a joint venture with the Defense Ministry of Russia in Gatchina in Leningrad region by the end of 2010 to manufacture at least 100 TV3-117VMA-SBM1V helicopter engines per year .

Red flags and alarm bells should be ringing right across Ukraine.. Politicians in Ukraine who have an interest in protecting Ukraine’s strategic national interests should be protesting this Party of Regions decision at all costs. There is no economic benefit to Ukraine in this JV, since Russia brings nothing to the table. Most importantly, Russia will gain access to and steal world-class Ukrainian engine design know-how and intellectual property, which Russia desperately needs to fulfill its military contracts with India and China to supply future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) and next generation helicopters.

The communist government in China is using a similar tactics to Russia, trying to pressure US auto manufacturers in establish JV’s in China if they want to sell electric cars to the Chinese. The USA fears losing their electric battery technology know-how to China (Wall Street Journal Sept 16 2010). Ukraine should have similar fears about aviation and Russian attempts to muscle in.

Walter Derzko is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic Innovation Lab (S-Lab) at OCAD University in Toronto and teaches at the MA program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI) at OCAD University in Toronto.

July 15, 2010

A study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Labor Economics finds that highly skilled temporary immigrants boost technological innovation in the U.S. without displacing U.S.-born workers in the process.

The study, by William Kerr of the Harvard Business School and William Lincoln of the University of Michigan, looked at fluctuations over the last 15 years in the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. under the H-1B visa program, which governs immigration of highly skilled temporary workers. The researchers found that when more H-1B visas are granted, the number of U.S. patent applications filed by people with Chinese and Indian names increased substantially in cities and firms dependent upon the program. Much of that increase can be attributed to H-1B immigrants.

Meanwhile, the number of applications filed by people with Anglo-Saxon names—a proxy for U.S.-born workers—did not vary with fluctuations in H-1B admissions.

"We conclude that total invention increased with higher [H-1B] admissions primarily through the direct contributions of immigrant inventors," the authors write. "We are also able to rule out displacement [of native workers]."

The study used data gathered from 1995 to 2008. Patent applications do not record inventors' nationalities, so the researchers used an algorithm to determine probable nationalities based on the inventors' names. They then compared those data with the number of H-1B visas granted in a given year. The number of visas fluctuated widely over the study period, due to changes in a government-mandated cap on the program. At its lowest, visas were capped at 65,000 per year, and peaked at 195,000.

"This study quantifies the impact of changes in H-1B admission levels on the pace and character of U.S. invention …," the authors write. "We hope that this assessment aids policy makers in their current decisions about appropriate admission rates in the future."

Source: William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln, "The Supply Side of Innovation: H‐1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention." Journal of Labor Economics 28:3 (July 2010).

Advances in the imaging of biological structures with transmission electron microscopy continue to reveal information at the nanometer length scale and below. The images obtained are static, i.e., time-averaged over seconds, and the weak contrast is usually enhanced through sophisticated specimen preparation techniques and/or improvements in electron optics and methodologies. Here we report the application of the technique of photon-induced near-field electron microscopy (PINEM) to imaging of biological specimens with femtosecond (fs) temporal resolution.

In PINEM, the biological structure is exposed to single-electron packets and simultaneously irradiated with fs laser pulses that are coincident with the electron pulses in space and time. By electron energy-filtering those electrons that gained photon energies, the contrast is enhanced only at the surface of the structures involved. This method is demonstrated here in imaging of protein vesicles and whole cells of Escherichia coli, both are not absorbing the photon energy, and both are of low-Z contrast. It is also shown that the spatial location of contrast enhancement can be controlled via laser polarization, time resolution, and tomographic tilting. The high-magnification PINEM imaging provides the nanometer scale and the fs temporal resolution. The potential of applications is discussed and includes the study of antibodies and immunolabeling within the cell.

Key words Evanescent nanoscale biostructure

Footnotes 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: zewail@caltech.edu. Author contributions: D.J.F., B.B., and A.H.Z. designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents/analytic tools, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest.